This calls for fireworks: Woman to turn 100 on July 4

Monday

Jun 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMJun 30, 2008 at 10:21 AM

Living life to the hilt has agreed with Ione Schubert. She’ll be 100 years old July 4, and is still going strong. She’s inherited good genes. Her mother lived beyond 100 and a brother made it to within a few months of his “centennial” year.

Harriett Gustason

Living life to the hilt has agreed with Ione Schubert.

She’ll be 100 years old July 4, and is still going strong. She’s inherited good genes. Her mother lived beyond 100 and a brother made it to within a few months of his “centennial” year.

The staff at Lena Living Center where Schubert lives calls her a “social butterfly.” She enjoys visiting with other residents, and Shane, the maintenance man, is a favorite of hers. She says he keeps track of her by where she parks her walker.

She likes to talk, especially about old times. She’s sparkling company with her sharing of her childhood antics on a farm south of Woodbine, through the years farming with her husband, and her work at a manufacturing plant in Stockton. The farm where she grew up is now Woodbine Bend Golf Course.

Schubert is bright and perky. She’s blessed with a sharp mind and working faculties. Perhaps her greatest asset, aside from her attentive daughter, Mary Ellen Lincoln of Freeport, is her droll sense of humor.

“I learned to smoke when I started to school,” she said. “The boys rolled pencil shavings up in tablet paper.”

Once, when her brother Bob was supposed to be watching her, he placed her on the handlebars of his bicycle at the top of the second floor stairway, got on himself and rode down the steps and out the front door.

Ione said the bike caught on the threshold and both she and Bob went flying in opposite directions.

When her mother heard the racket she asked if they were dead, her father answered, “No, but I hope they learned a lesson.”

Schubert didn’t go into the details of their injuries, but both were privileged to long lives with all their limbs.

A Favorite Story

One of Lincoln’s favorite stories about Schubert is of her mother getting out of school to help with butchering pigs. She remembers her mother saying that butchering often meant doing an extra pig “to help the neighbor who wasn’t able to make ends meet.”

Schubert said her job in the butchering process was to clean out the intestines for use as casings for sausage.

“They didn’t feed the pigs – slop them – the night before,” she said. After butchering, the kids would often carry fresh liver sandwiches made with homemade bread. She said a boy in the school brought coconut-topped marshmallow cookies from his father’s grocery store and would always want to trade them for her liver sandwiches.

Sometimes kids would fight over their lunches, she said. In the wintertime when they left them in the cloakroom, the food would often be frozen and they’d have to thaw them over the stove that heated the schoolroom.

“There was only one stove,” she said.

She went to the Woodbine school through eighth grade then to Elizabeth High School, which she attended until she had to leave six weeks into her senior year to help family. But she went on to earn her GED at the age of 80. She had entertained the idea of taking the nursing course, but thought it might be a bit much.

Minister’s Priorities

Ione married Glen Schubert on Sept. 22, 1937, at the Little Brown Church in Nashua, Iowa. Things didn’t go as planned that day, however. When they arrived at the appointed time, the minister was missing. He was canning peaches with his wife and the wedding would have to wait. So the couple had the wedding dinner first, with the ceremony taking place after the peaches were in their jars.

Ione took a job at Atwood Vacuum and Machine Factory in Stockton to “straighten Mary Ellen’s teeth and put her through high school and nurse’s training.”

Ione is proud of the necklace the company gave her for her years of service. She remembers pumping pedals at the factory and having to hustle to make rate. She and Glen farmed south of Stockton where Mary Ellen grew up.

“My daughter took over the household and is a better cook than I am,” Ione said. But Lincoln claims her mom was “a very good cook, made the best fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy I have ever had.” As hard as she’s tried, Lincoln said she could never duplicate them. She is proud of all her mother’s accomplishments, the 85 afghans she’s crocheted, “so many for so many people.”

Lincoln said one year she posted a note at work for anyone wishing some of her mother’s peanut brittle, “the thinnest, tastiest ever.” Within days she had 80 orders for it and her mother wound up making more than 100 batches that year.

“Mother,” Lincoln adds to her mother’s list of accomplishments, “always had a huge garden and would can and freeze meat, vegetables and fruits. It was nothing for her to can 80 quarts of tomato juice a year, plus beans, corn, beets, pickles, cherries, peaches, applesauce and strawberries. She did all this while helping Dad on the farm and working in the steel factory. She raised chickens and ducks and would butcher them and sell them ... and she always had beautiful flowers. I remember she would plant zinnias along with the onions so that when the onions were pulled there wouldn’t be an empty row, but rather a beautiful row of flowers!”

Lincoln said her mother volunteered many hours at Freeport Memorial Hospital and crocheted many lap robes for the skilled care unit and made little hats for the newborns.

When Ione and Glen quit farming, Glen went to work for the village of Warren. Glen died in 1971, and in 1980, Ione moved to Freeport to make her home in the upstairs of her daughter and son-in-law’s duplex. She was happy there with her two granddaughters close by, Lincoln said. In 1998, she moved to Meadow Ridge Apartments where she remained until 2007 when she moved to Lena Living Center.

Great Birthday ‘Bashes’

Ione’s July 4th birthdays were special as great picnics were held on the holiday.

“They’d clean and mow the timber and start the ice cream freezer,” she said, remembering the holiday always being cold and them having the cook stove roaring with a wood fire and their feet in the oven trying to keep warm while they ate the homemade treat.

She has her own little haven of memories at the Lena center. Photos of her daughter and son-in-law, her two granddaughters and three great-grandchildren predominate on tables and a bulletin board. She brings out her childhood doll clad in a dainty silk dress and petticoat her mother had made. She points out its scuffed feet from her dragging it around as a child. She has the tiny but heavy flat iron her mother once used to iron her father’s shirts, and a choice sugar bowl from her grandmother.

Ione has missed no opportunity in her life to reap its richness. Her family is honoring her with an open house on July 6. In addition to Ione’s immediate family, a number of devoted nieces and nephews also will be on hand.

This remarkable centenarian and “social butterfly” should be right in her element with all those folks with whom to share memories.